Mandaris

Earlier this week, with a spark for building but no particular idea in mind, I started to think about the Linux manual page. Could I serve my blog posts as Linux manual pages? Herein lay an adventure.

WHOA! This completely blew my mind!

This study compares two websites with identical design: the commercial Spotlight template from developers of Tailwind vs the same site with semantic CSS

I found this via Robb Knight's mastodon/website and laughed to myself when I read No Comment.

I've been using tools that help developer things faster for years. It feels like all the time we save accrues interest and we have to payback in other costs.

As you can imagine, we spend a lot of our time working on really, really old books. So why not create a website out of really, really old technology?

A pretty interesting read. It's part of what got me interested in static website generation. Also, came across the word "paean" which I haven't seen in so long that I thought it was a typo.

I love comics and I feel that this is a real treat to see what you can do with CSS.

For years, I would hear people say that it takes 100 days to develop a new habit. I didn’t set out to do that. I wanted to write on a more regular basis and just started writing on November 1st of last year. I was determined to write something every day and post it.

What was the experience?

Sometimes it was actually pretty stressful coming up with something to write about. Some days were just one-liners that I would have just tweeted. Sometimes Many times, it was a picture of my dog; who I think deserves her own blog.

What if I annoy people who were reading my site and they go away? Well, I didn’t have that many readers anyway, and my pieces are typically very short.

The benefit of being semi-anonymous was that I honestly couldn’t tell if people liked it or not. It was kind of freeing and let me think about how I was writing.

I started exploring more into what it means to be the first audience for my writing. That doesn’t mean that I spent a lot of time agonizing over making things perfect, but it did mean that there were a couple of posts that took more time to write.

What’s next?

I plan on stopping the daily post for a couple of days and working through some of my post ideas that I’ve been putting into Drafts. The more ideas you capture, the more ideas you make.

I also want to start highlighting some post from other people on the internet. I love the web when it connects us with cool ideas.

Spent the last few days building a small site which will convert an OPML file of RSS subscriptions into an HTML list of links to their respective websites. I needed it for a blogroll I’m planning to add, but I figured this might be something others may find useful.

I know this person and I feel that this is a wonderful idea. As I've seen more and more people talk about making their own personal sites, I feel that it's fantastic to have tools to help with the process.

I’ve been thinking about the general friction that I experience when it comes to making posts and then putting them onto my blog. It feels that it has become both easier and harder to write something that I like.

What do I mean by writing?

In this instance, I am referring to my posts that are more than my pithy one liners or pictures of my dog.

It’s valid and I am not ashamed of most any of it.

What I’m referring to in this article is anything that takes longer than 10 minutes to write. These pieces of writing are harder for me because of the amount of time and focus that I am able to put into it.

I feel that I only have a couple of minutes before my mind wonders or I am called upon to do something else. Most times it’s my own brain telling me about all the other things I should/could be doing.

Where do my ideas start?

I used to carry a set of index cards; at one point called the hipster PDA. I stopped after losing my Good quality pens on a regular basis and being mocked repeatedly by my loving wife.

Since then, I’ve tried adding information to Apple Reminders or Notes (this was before they got good). It’s decent for simple one liners but complex ideas would come with the unwritten hope that I would remember what I meant by “pumpkin pickles”.

Recently, I’ve started using Drafts to capture links and notes. At first, I thought that I was only going to be using it for a little bit. Some of the podcasters have been raving about it for years and I got caught up in hype around it.

The hype is real. I’ve grown to like it more and more because of the simplicity and stability of the software. The sync has been pretty good; I’m able to start writing in one place and then move from one device to another. I’ve even had a few ideas start off from a voice dictation on my watch, but I’ve only done that less than a dozen times.

I’ve played around with the idea of keeping a rule to clear out the inbox daily. I haven’t stuck to it, but this is mainly because I see the Drafts inbox as something that I have complete control over. Unlike my email inbox which has seen a tremendous increase in things wanting my attention.

Revisions?

Drafts is a wonderful application and I’ll continue exploring it as I’ve become more comfortable with its feature set. One of the hurdles that I’m running into is that I’m looking for a way to do grammar checks.

A lot¹ of my writing is done in chunks that are determined by availability of time and energy.

I feel that I need a workflow to help me decide if something that I wrote makes sense before posting it on the World Wide Web.

I’ve tried putting my draft into Ulysses. Unfortunately, a large portion of my writing contains code examples that have the formatting removed when sent to the server.

The hardest posts for me to write are the ones about my Hugo/Micro.blog theme. For those posts, I find myself moving from Ulysses to BBEdit/iTerm to Marsedit.

It makes me not want to put in the time to write.

But, I really enjoy writing.

So, I’ll be pushing myself to read over my drafts … in drafts going forward.

In high school, I had to read a book titled “Go Ask Alice”. It was a book composed of journal entries of a young woman who get addicted to drugs and experiences a lot of misfortune before ultimately dying from an overdose.

One of the interesting things about it was during the class discussion, we talked about how the book wasn’t actually real and that the accounts in the book might be a composition of different stories put together. An allegory of what could happens if you do drugs.

I used to think that something like that would do the opposite of keeping kids off drugs. Once you know that “Alice” wasn’t real, then what else isn’t real in the story.

It was disingenuous.

A similar book recently came out about “A million little pieces” and it was worse as the author at first claimed it was his own story and was even in the Oprah Winfrey’s book club.

But, now I think I can look upon these works from a different view point.

These stories don’t have to be 100% accurate.

It’s because we see them time and time again. Different names, different faces.

Same out come.

My daughter was telling me about a classmate at her school who was bragging about how she was high during school.

Does it matter if her name is “Alice”?

I just pushed a point release of the theme to GitHub. The majority of the changes are related to colors and line adjustments based off of reading 12 Modern CSS One-Line Upgrades by Stephanie Eckles.

Crossing the line

Years ago, I read an article stating that although it’s good to underline links, it can be difficult in some circumstance because certain characters like q, j, p will touch the line. Some developers used box-shadow get around this and I had taken that route for this theme.

When I read Stephanie’s article, I came across a section I learned about text-underline-offset. I also checked that I can use it in most browsers before I let myself get excited. I spent the last couple of days refactoring my CSS to use this finally posted it.

There are still instances where the text intersects the line, but during writing this post, I came across this article on styling with underlines by Ollie Williams. In it, he mentions that the property text-decoration-skip-ink is on by default.

…

Well, I’m hoping that this understanding of how these things work lead to a better site in the future. Although, I still use box-shadow as a makeshift highlight for hovering over links, removing it from link underlining reduces complexity.

The space between us

Other than that, I’m doing some adjustments to line-height. Elements such as ruby, rt, sub, and sup can cause the linespacing not to be uniform within a paragraph. I adjusted the spacing by doing this in the root element but I do not like the way that it added space between all the other block elements on the page.

I pushed this change but it’s probably moving to the top of the list of priorities after I do some more research on the rhythm of line spacing.

Another coat of paint

I’ve decided to change the color for the headings so that it is closer to the basic font. This will increase the contrast ratio and make it easier to read.

For this, I learned to let go of trying to make everything pop out at you and let my readers enjoy reading the site.

The ReadMe

When I do a point release, I update the README.md on the GitHub project page.

Here are the release notes for this point release.

• Improve h* tags by changing color to --text-alt
• Make changes to text-decoration inspired by 12 Modern CSS One-Line Upgrades to various elements
• Turn on debugging by default temporarily
• Modify cursor on <abbr>
• Adjust line-height to make sub, sup, and ruby elements less obtrusive
• Add accent-color to root of CSS

As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions or comments!

This is the 1991 debut album from Color Me Badd and one of my favorites. This is a page where you can find links on where to listen to it.It’s not for kids and this post might be the most risqué thing I have ever posted. But, the world is kind of crazy, so I’m hoping that this entertains at least one more person than myself.

I probably listened to this album way before I should have, but it really highlights the innocence of youth in that I had No idea what most of these songs were about. They had good beats and harmonies that kept me holding on to my father’s scratched CD long after I had something to play with it.

I was getting tired of some of the regular albums that I jam out to. I thought I would give this one try and write down how it makes me feel as an adult.

1. I Wanna Sex You Up

“The ticktock you don’t stop”. I had no idea what this song was about. What were they doing and how come they wanted to do it all night long?

Still love the harmonies of the group and I found myself getting back into the groove.

I now understand why people would want to unplug their phones so that they aren’t disturbed, but for completely different reasons.

2. All 4 Love

This one makes me think of malt shops and quartets. Probably the most “innocent” of the songs on this album and a nice balance from the first track. I don’t think I’ve ever chosen to play this song. It usually comes up because i am listening to the whole album. Not bad, and kind of cute.

3. Heartbreaker

Harmonies and a dance beat. A song about how some people will take advantage of you.

“You’re just a using girl, you’re driving me like a car”.

4. I Adore Mi Amor

Seriously one of the best songs on the album. This is the first album that I ever had with a language that wasn’t English. When I would sing along, I just mumbled in this part and waited for the last line Te quiero mucho, me amor.

This ballad is amazing.

I was thinking about making this my karaoke 🎤 song, but I only know the chorus.

5. Groove My Mind

Classic 90’s R&B song theme. Not much to note. If I hadn’t listened to this album dozens of times, I wouldn’t have remembered it. I think this was song I would listen to to make me feel that I could listen to music and do other things.

6. I Wanna Sex You Up (reprise)

My first time listening to a reprise. Countless moments of disappointment when it comes up randomly on instead of the real song.

A whole minute to contemplate skipping or finding the full song.

7. Roll The Dice

This one just gets me into the groove! I don’t have a lot of notes, because I found myself dancing in my seat.

Mostly chorus and bridge, but if you haven’t understood what this grove is about then I can’t explain it to you.

8. Slow Motion

Another song where 12-year-old me had no idea why doing anything slowly would be worth it.

“I want to love you so slow that you come before I do.”

I sang that line loud in front of my parents at 12 and thought love meant thinking fondly of the other person, and they would come over to your house.

9. Thinking’ Back

My favorite song on the album.

Also, the only track that I would skip near the end due to a scratch.

I’m glad I didn’t have access to this CD when I was going through a breakup.

It was in heavy rotation.

Listening to it now, I can feel my body tense up right around the time that the cd would skip.

10. I Adore Mi Amor (interlude)

Two teases in this album!!

45 seconds and this one is hard for me to determine if it’s the true song before it stops.

It’s more of a reminder that I need to get ready to push the button to restart the album.

11. Color Me Badd

Title track.

This is similar to Motownphilly; an introduction of what the group can do and how they can sing together.

12. Your Da One I One Love

“Love” means sex in this one.

I don’t think I need to explain.

The young version of me took it literally and knew that it was time to get another CD to play or restart this one.

In summary

Well, now I don’t feel that I can complain about modern music lacking innuendo. Most of the tracks are so thinly veiled, That it makes the emperor’s new clothes look like winter wear.

Still, I love it. I especially loved writing about it here. Let me know if you have a similar album in your life or suggest other albums.

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